Aquí Europa
The third vice president of the Government and minister for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera, has assumed that the Iberian exception, which allows Spain and Portugal to decouple the evolution of the price of electricity from the price of natural gas, will decline on the 31st from December.
“The extension of the Iberian mechanism, which in principle ends on December 31, requires an approval procedure from the Directorate General of Competition of the European Commission, which made it clear that it understood that beyond December 31 of this year it was not possible. put it into practice,” the vice president reported this past Tuesday at a press conference after the meeting of European Energy Ministers.
In this sense, Ribera argued that prices have stabilized and are below the figures that were recorded at the end of last year, when this extraordinary price control instrument came into action.
Sources from the Ministry assume that the measure will expire when it expires at the end of December, after pointing out that Spain already expected that the extension negotiated with Brussels before the summer would be the last, taking into account that the instrument has not had any effect on the processes of Marginal matching in wholesale markets since the end of February.
The so-called ‘Iberian exception’ – which allows establishing a cap on the price of gas used to produce electricity – was approved in June 2022 after the European Council approved the right of the two Iberian countries to manage their own reference prices. of gas for combined cycle plants, in response to the character of the peninsula as an “energy island” due to its very low interconnection with the European energy market. The measure was extended until the end of 2023 after the agreement reached by Spain and Portugal with the European Commission to extend it for another seven months.
